The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3)

The Madonnas of Raffaelle, whether hailed parents of a God, or pressing the divine offspring to their breast, whether receiving him from his slumbers, or contemplating his infant motions, are uniformly transcripts from the daily domestic images of common life and of some favourite face matronized: the eyes of his Fornarina beamed with other fires than those of sanctity; the sense and native dignity of her lover could veil their fierceness, but not change their language.

The Madonna of Titiano receives her celestial visitant under an open portico of Palladian structure, and skirted by gay gardens; the usual ray precedes the floating angel; gold-ringleted and in festive attire, he waves a lily wand: in sable weeds the Virgin receives the gorgeous homage, proudly devout, like a young abbess amidst her cloistered lambs.

Tintoretto has turned salutation into irruption. The angel bursts through the shattered casement and terrifies a vulgar female; but his wings are tipped in heaven.³⁶

168. Dignity gives probability to the impossible: we listen to the monstrous tale of Ulysses with all the devotion due to a creed. By dignity, even deformity becomes an instrument of art: Vulcan limps like a god at the hand of Homer: the hump and withered arm of Richard are engines of terror or persuasion in Shakspeare; the crook-back of Michael Angelo strikes with awe.

169. Luxuriance of ornament destroys simplicity and repose, the attendants of dignity.

Coroll.– "Simon Mosca, one of the most distinguished sculptors of ornament and foliage in the sixteenth century, when proposed by Vasari to embellish by his designs the monument of the Cardinal di Monte, was discountenanced by Michael Angelo on this principle." Vasari, vita de Simone Mosca.

170. Judge not an artist from the exertions of accidental vigour or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the uniform tenor, the never-varying principle of his works: the line and style of Titian sometimes expand themselves like those of Michael Angelo; the heads and groups of Raphael sometimes glow and palpitate with Titiano's tints; and there are masses of both united in Correggio: but if you aim at character, let Raphael be your guide; if at colour, Tiziano; if harmony allure, Correggio: they indulged in alternate excursions, but never lost sight of their own domain.

Coroll.– No one, of whatever period of art, of whatever eminence or school, out-told Rembrandt in telling the story of a subject, in the choice of its real crisis, in simplicity, in perspicuity: still, as the vile crust that involves his ore, his local vulgarity of style, the ludicrous barbarity of his costume, prepossess eyes less penetrating than squeamish against him, it requires some confidence to place him with the classics of invention. Yet with all these defects, with every prejudice or superiority of taste and style against him, what school has produced a work (M. Angelo's Creation of Adam, and the Death of Ananias by Raffaelle excepted,) which looks not pale in the superhuman splendour that irradiates his conception of Christ before Pilate, unless it be the raising of Lazarus by Lievens, a name comparatively obscure, whose awful sublimity reduces the same subject as treated by Rembrandt and Sebastian of Venice, to artificial parade or common-place?

171. Tone is the moral part of colour.

172. If tone be the legitimate principle of colour, he who has not tone, though he should excel in individual imitation, colours in fragments and produces discord.

173. Harmony of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally remote from monotony and spots.

174. The eye tinges all nature with its own hue. The eye of the Dutch and Flemish schools, though shut to forms, tipped the cottage, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and even the haze of winter, with orient hues and the glow of setting suns.

175. Clearness, freshness, force of colour, are produced by simplicity; one pure, is more than a mixture of many.

176. Colour affects or delights like sound. Scarlet or deep crimson rouses, determines, invigorates the eye, as the war-horn or the trumpet the ear; the flute soothes the ear, as pale celestial blue or rosy red the eye.

177. The colours of sublimity are negative or generic – such is the colouring of Michael Angelo.

178. The passions that sway features and limbs equally reside, fluctuate, flash and lower in colour.

179. The colours of pleasure and love are hues.

180. The colour of gravity, reverie, solemnity, approaches to twilight.

181. Colour in Raffaelle was the assistant of expression; to Titian it was the vehicle of truth; Correggio made it the minister of harmony. It was sometimes seized, and though reluctant held, but oftener neglected by the first; it was embraced, it domineered over, it coalesced with the second; it attended the third like an enchanted spirit.

182. Lodovico Carracci was the first who gave in oil the colours of gravity, the dignified twilight of cloistered meditation.

183. Annibale Carracci, from want of feelings, though impressed by a grave principle, changed the mild evening-ray of his master to the bleak light of a sullen day.

184. Colour owes its effect sometimes more to position and gradation than to its intrinsic value.³⁷

185. The colour of Titian is the most independent of surrounding objects; their union may assist, but their discrepance cannot destroy it.

186. The harmony of Correggio is independent of colour.

187. Historic colour imitates, but copies not.

188. The portrait-painter copies the colour of his object, but chooses the medium through which that object is seen.

189. The mixtures that anticipate the beauties of time are big with the seeds of premature decay.

190. The colours of health are neither cadaverous nor flushed like meteors.

191. There are works whose effect is entirely founded on the contrast of tints, of what is termed warm and cold colour, and on reflected hues: strip them of this charm, reduce them to the principles of light and shade and masses, and as far as the want of those can degrade a picture, they will be fit to take their places on sign-posts.

192. Him who has freshness without frigidity, who glows without being adust, whose tints luxuriate though not fermented by putrefaction; who is juicy yet not clammy, though broad not empty, sharp without dryness, clear not pellucid, airy not volatile, without being clumsy plump – him you may venture to call a colourist.

193. Breadth is not vacuity – Breadth might easily be obtained if emptiness could give it.

194. The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate: Minerva's drapery descends in long uninterrupted lines; a thousand amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora.

195. Subordination is the character of drapery. The heraldry of dress, the rows of aggregated mitres and pontifical trappings, are noticed only for the sake of their wearers in the compositions of the Vatican.

Coroll.– The superiority of style in drapery over that of the limbs which it covers in the earliest essays of art after its restoration, is not accounted for by the assertion that it is transcribed from the antique: if it is, by what unaccountable perverseness did the forms of the nudities uniformly escape observation? In painting, this dissonance continues more or less offensively from the epoch of Cimabue to that of Masaccio, and, him excepted, down to Pinturicchio; and ceases not to shock us in sculpture from the Pisani, to the appearance of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Nor did that style of drapery mark only the productions of Italian art; on this side of the Alps it invested that of Germany, from the Angels and Madonnas of Martin Schongaver and Albert Durer, to those of Aldegraver and Sebald Behm: in nearly all their performances, Trans and Cisalpine, the wearer is the appendix of his garment, chucked into vestments not his own, a dwarfish thief hid in a giant's robe.

196. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character; in Michael Angelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Rubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

197. If Nature has not taught you to sketch, you apply in vain to art to finish your work.³⁸

198. Some must be idle lest others should want work.³⁹

199. He who submits to follow, is not made to precede.⁴⁰

200. Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakspeare wept, trembled, laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.

201. None but indelible materials can support the epic. Whatever is local, or the volatile creature of the time, beauties of fashion and sentiments of sects, tears shed over roses, epigrammatic sparkling, passions taught to rave, and graces trained to move, the antiquary's mouldering stores, the bubbles of allegorists – are all with equal contempt passed over or crushed by him who claims the lasting empire of the human heart.

202. The invention of machines to supersede manual labour will at length destroy population and commerce;⁴¹ and the methods contrived to shorten the apprenticeship of artists annihilate art.

203. Expect no religion in times when it is easier to meet with a saint than a man; and no art in those that multiply their artists beyond their labourers.

204. Expect nothing but trifles in times when those who ought to encourage the arts are content to debase them by their own performances.

205. Mediocrity despatches and exults; the man of talent congratulates himself on the success of his exertions – Genius alone mourns over defeated expectation.

206. Pride. – Call not him proud who is influenced by the tide and ebb of opinion.

207. Modesty. – The touchstone of genuine modesty is the attention paid to criticism, and the temper with which it is received, or its advice adopted; the most arrogant pretence, the most fiery ambition, the most towering conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness, silence and submissive looks – Oil, the smoothest of substances, swims on all.

208. Praise. – Despise all praise but what he gives who has been praised for similar efforts; or his whose interest it is to blame.

209. Emulation. – The vindication of the innate powers, of the individual dignity of man, careless of appendages and accidental advantage, grasps the substance of its object.

210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-love, grasps the appendages, heedless of things. Emulation embalms the dead; Envy the vampire, blasts the living.

211. Flattery, the midwife of half-born conceits and struggling wishes, sometimes persuades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he is a giant, but too often enervates the limbs of energy.

212. Vanity. – The vain is the most humble of mortals: the victim of a pimple.

213. Those reduced to live on the alms of genius, are the first to deny its existence.

214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a tempestuous night are to daylight.

215. Things came to Raffaelle and Shakspeare; Michael Angelo and Milton came to things.

216. The women of Michael Angelo are the sex.

Coroll.– Eve emerging from the side of Adam; Eve reclining under the tree of knowledge, in the Capella Sistina; the figures of Night and Dawn on the tombs of the Medici, are pure generic forms, little discriminated by character, and more expressive by action than emotion of features; solidity without heaviness separates them from the females in the Last Judgment, which, with the exception of the Madonna and St. Catharine, are less beholden to grace than anatomy. The Cartoon of the Leda proves that he was not inattentive to the detail of female charms, but beauty did not often visit his slumbers, guide his hand, or interrupt the gravity of his meditation.

217. The women of Raffaelle are either his own mistress, or mothers.

Coroll.– This relates chiefly to his Madonnas – Of his saints the St. Cecilia at Bologna has most of antique beauty, and, whether imitated or conceived, resembles the Niobe; but pride is absorbed in devotion, she is the enraptured victim of divine love, and glows with celestial fire: the goddesses of the Farnesina, however gracefully imagined, are too ponderous for aërial forms and amorous conceits.

218. The women of Correggio are seraglio beauties.

Coroll.– The enchantment of the Magdalen, in the picture of the St. Jerome in the Pilotta at Parma, is produced by chiaroscuro and attitude. Sensuality personified is the general character of his females, and the grace of his children, less naiveté than grimace, the caricature of jollity.

219. The women of Titiano are the plump, fair, marrowy Venetian race.

Coroll.– Venus taking a reluctant farewell of Adonis; Diana starting at the intrusion of Acteon, with every allure of attitude, with heads dressed by the Graces, are local beauties, sink under the weight of Venetian limbs, and are only distinguished by contrast from the model that plumped herself down for his Danae. The reposing figure commonly called the Venus of the Tribuna, is an exquisite portrait of some favourite female, but not a Venus.

220. The women of Parmegiano are coquettes.

221. The women of Annibale Carracci are made up by imitation and vulgarity.

Coroll.– Venus with Anchises, Juno with Jupiter, Omphale with Hercules, Diana and Calisto in the Farnese gallery, owe their charms and dignity of action to imitation; the celebrated three Maries, Magdalen penitent in her hempen shroud, are the conceptions of his own mind.

222. The women of Guido are actresses.

223. The forms of Domenichino's female faces are ideal; their expression is poised between pure helpless virginity and sainted ecstasy.

224. The veiled eyes of Guercino's females dart insidious fire.

225. Such is the fugitive essence, such the intangible texture of female genius, that few combinations of circumstances ever seemed to favour its transmission to posterity.

226. In an age of luxury women have taste, decide and dictate; for in an age of luxury woman aspires to the functions of man, and man slides into the offices of woman. The epoch of eunuchs was ever the epoch of viragoes.

227. Female affection is ever in proportion to the impression of superiority in the object. Woman fondles, pities, despises and forgets what is below her; she values, bears and wrangles with her equal; she adores what is above her.

228. Be not too squeamish in the choice of your materials; you will disgrace the best, if you cannot give value to the worst: the gold and azure wasted on Rosselli's⁴² draperies cannot give value to their folds or hide the wants beneath.

229. There are moments when all are men, and only men, and ought to be no more; but the artist, who when his daily task is over can lock his meditation up with his tools – ranks with mechanics.

230. Date the death of emulation and of excellence from the moment of your employer's indifference; and mediocrity of success from the moment of his meddling with the process of your work.

231. One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams, and what may be called the personification of sentiment: the Prophets, Sibyls and Patriarchs of Michael Angelo are so many branches of one great sentiment. The dream of Raffaello is a characteristic representation of a dream; the dream of Michael Angelo is moral inspiration, a sublime sentiment.

Coroll.– Of three visionary subjects ascribed to Raffaello and known from the prints of Marc Antonio, Georgio Mantuano, and Agostino Veneziano, this alludes to the last, called by the Italians Stregozzo, by the French "La Carcasse: " an association of ideas big with the very elements of dreams, and almost a definition. That it be a conception of Raffaello rests on no other proof than the tablet of Marc Antonio and its own internal merit; which is so uniform that although one principal figure is undoubtedly transcribed from another in the cartoon of Pisa, the whole can never be considered as a pasticcio.

232. A trite subject becomes interesting by the introduction of appropriate ornaments; a small statue of Moses breaking the tables in the back-ground of a Salutation; and a number of Baptists in that of a Madonna with her son and Joseph, expressing the dissolution of the old and the institution of the new doctrine, both by Michael Angelo,⁴³ give unexpected sublimity to subjects for which Raffaelle and Titiano had ransacked in vain the nursery and heaven.

233. Compilation is the lowest degree in art, but let him who means to borrow with impunity, follow the statesman's maxim: "strip the mean and spare the great."

Coroll.– A composition of which every thing was borrowed from himself, being shown to Michael Angelo, and his opinion asked, "I commend it," said he, "but when on the day of judgement each body shall claim its original limbs, what will remain in this picture?"

234. He ought to possess some himself, who attempts to make use of borrowed excellence: a golden goblet on a beggar's table, serves only to expose its companions of lead.

235. Resemblance, character, costume, are the three requisites of portrait: the first distinguishes, the second classifies, the third assigns place and time to an individual.

236. Landscape is either the transcript of a spot, or a picturesque combination of homogeneous objects, or the scene of a phenomenon. The first pleases by precision and taste; the second adds variety and grandeur; the third may be an instrument of sublimity, affect our passions, or wake a sentiment.

237. Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

238. He never can be great who honours what is little.

Coroll.– Grandeur of style and execution do not exclusively depend upon dimensions: but in an age and amidst a race who have erected littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the only credentials of admissibility into collections, to the passports without which Raffaelle himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanctuaries of pigmy art, that which ennobled the age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be content to look to posterity for its reward. If it were physiognomically true, that the structure of every human face bears some analogy to that of some brute, it might reasonably surprise, that an individual marked by nature with no very remote resemblance to a Hippopotamus, should be considered as the legislator of a taste equally noted for tameness of conception and effeminate finish; but as it is improbable that one individual, however favoured by circumstances or endowed with all-persevering activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of a nation exclusively with his own, it may be fairly surmised that he did no more than find and rear the seeds of that Micromania which infects the public taste.

239. The medium of poetry is time and action; that of the plastic arts, space and figure. Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand arrests time and embodies action: and these, when they wing the marble or the canvass, and from the present moment dart rays back to the past and forward to the future.

Coroll.– Subjects are positive, negative, repulsive. The first are the proper materials, the voluntary servants of invention; to the second she gives interest and value; from the last she can escape only by the help of execution, for execution alone can palliate her defeat by the last. The Laocoon, the Hæmon and Antigone, the Niobe and her daughters, the death of Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck blind, are positive subjects, speak their meaning with equal evidences to the scholar and the unlettered man, and excite the sympathy due to the calls of terror and pity with equal energy in every breast. St. Jerome presenting the translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St. Peter at the feet of the Madonna receiving the thanksgivings of victorious Venice, with every other votive altar-piece, little interesting to humanity in general, owe the impression they make on us to the dexterous arrangement, the amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist; – but we lament to see invention waste its powers, and execution its skill, to excite our feelings for an action or event that receives its real interest from a motive which cannot be rendered intuitive; such as Alceste expiring, the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Demetrius's disorder.